Exploring the Brighter side of Voice Search and Speech enabled Commerce

Voice commands have enabled a hands-free shopping experience for online shoppers. Since it requires less intervention from the user, voice shopping and voice search is expected to grow.

For quite some time conversational commerce has enabled customers to interact with brands in real-time. The chat apps and voice assistants are now becoming an integral part of online businesses. However, they are about to take a leap forward with voice search that returns the right results to a spoken query. Essentially, this would boost the online sales as the millennials and post millennials are the first generations fully accustomed to the usage of voice search.

But that’s not all. Over half of iphone users now use siri, whereas, Google Ok is gaining traction among android users. As for the users between the age group of 18 – 24, at least 48% are already using voice recognition software. So, if the smartphone market currently stands at 2.5 billion users, it creates 1 to 1.5 billion potential customers who would readily use voice tech. Will you use voice search for shopping?

What is speech technology?

The term speech tech involves 2 different techs called speech recognition and speech production. In case of speech recognition, speech becomes the input to the system, whereas speech production offers a modality for conveying the output of the system verbally to the user though the auditory channel.

Why speech search matters?

It has become inevitable to incorporate voice recognition and voice search in ecommerce owing to the growing number of users who are accustomed to this technology.

It makes search convenient and faster for people on the go because speech was about 3.0 times faster than the keyboard for English.

Voice recognition and voice search also caters to the elderly and disabled user groups that cannot make use of the visuo-motor communication.

Speech search makes use of user’s purchasing history to suggest relevant products.

Voice search goes mobile

Businesses are already investing in optimizing mobile app experiences to fit voice search and voice recognition. It all started with Amazon introducing Alexa. That was the first mover that came up with custom voice experience. While some pioneers are leading the way for speech search, the user in general will benefit from all who enable them to find exactly what they are looking for at much faster pace.

Voice gets competitive advantage

It is expected that by 2020, 50% of all search will involve voice. Markets predict that a massive increase in Voice Shopping is to expected come following the wide acceptance of Smart Speakers by users, as more people are using Smart Speakers to make at least one purchase. However, these purchases are mostly low-value purchases, with a maximum of 20% going to Grocery, 19% to entertainment, 17% to electronics, and 8% to clothing.

In a nutshell speech-enabled ecommerce has a lot to offer to the elderly and the disabled, perhaps even more than its ordinary users. Speech enabled ecommerce has already become a reality despite the fact that there are certain limitations to robust speech recognition and speech production of high quality.